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Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (Inside Technology)
Shobita Parthasarathy
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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ASIN: 0262162423 |
Book Description
In Building Genetic Medicine, Shobita Parthasarathy shows how, even in an era of globalization, national context is playing an important role in the development and use of genetic technologies. Focusing on the development and deployment of genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer (known as BRCA testing) in the United States and Britain, Parthasarathy develops a comparative analysis framework in order to investigate how national "toolkits" shape both regulations and the architectures of technologies and uses this framework to assess the implications of new genetic technologies.
BRCA testing was one of the most highly anticipated and publicized technologies of contemporary medicine. Parthasarathy argues that differences in the American and British approaches to health care and commercialization of research led to the establishment of different BRCA services in the two countries. In Britain, the technology was available through the National Health Service as an integrated program of counseling and laboratory analysis, and was viewed as a potentially cost-effective form of preventive care. In the United States, although BRCA testing was initially offered by a number of providers, one company eventually became the sole provider of a test available to consumers on demand.
Parthasarathy also reports on an unsuccessful attempt by the American provider of BRCA testing to market its services in Britain. British scientists, health-care providers, and patients rejected the American technology, she argues, because it was part of a social, economic, and political system to which they were not accustomed. Parthasarathy draws lessons for the future of genetic medicine from these cross-national differences, and discusses the ways in which comparative case studies can inform policy-making efforts in science and technology.
Book Description
A brave, moral argument for cloning and its power to fight disease.
A timely investigation into the ethics, history, and potential of human cloning from Professor Ian Wilmut, who shocked scientists, ethicists, and the public in 1997 when his team unveiled Dolly—that very special sheep who was cloned from a mammary cell. With award-winning science journalist Roger Highfield, Wilmut explains how Dolly launched a medical revolution in which cloning is now used to make stem cells that promise effective treatments for many major illnesses. Dolly's birth also unleashed an avalanche of speculation about the eventuality of cloning babies, which Wilmut strongly opposes. However, he does believe that scientists should one day be allowed to combine the cloning of human embryos with genetic modification to free families from serious hereditary disease. In effect, he is proposing the creation of genetically altered humans. 20 illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
Human Cloning - Not The Issue.......2006-11-04
Ian Wilmut - with the help of science journalist Roger Highfield - tells the exciting story of how he and his group cloned Dolly, whose donor cell came from the udder of an adult sheep. Much of the book describes the science surrounding the multistage procedures of cloning. The challenges are enormous because of the immense complexity of the reproductive process and for technical reasons. The nuclear transfers themselves were done under a microscope on cells much smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.
Cloning has been successful in many species of mammals but according to Wilmut, attempts to clone humans are not ethical, feasible, or even desirable. The success rate is extremely low, abnormalities of pregnancy are the norm, the newborn mammals that survive are frequently not entirely normal, and identical genotypes ignore the environmental factors that influence individuality. This can be tolerated in cattle, but certainly not in humans. Using stem cells to cure disease is an entirely different story. Scientists are learning how to manipulate these cells to become replacements for diseased tissue in humans.
In 50 years, scientists may be using stem cells to cure Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Diabetes, heart disease, and perhaps scores of other diseases. They might learn how to grow customized organs in the lab, rendering transplant waiting lists and immune suppressive therapy unnecessary. In 10 years, they should have somewhat of a handle on a few of these diseases and stem cell treatments or cures for a couple of them. Unfortunately, this valuable research has been slowed by political and ethical controversy.
Wilmut takes a respectful and humble view of these valid ethical issues and the religious objections surrounding experimentation on a human embryo. His bottom line, however, is that the real immoral act would be to withhold definitive treatment of disease from that group of us who are already born.
"After Dolly" is written for a wide variety of readers, requiring knowledge of high school biology and a little genetics. Wilmut modestly gives away virtually all the credit to his team and other researchers, while thoroughly examining the science and history of this dynamic field. Amid the hysteria and media frenzy surrounding Dolly's birth and life, and the tons of newsprint generated about the possibility of cloning humans, Wilmut was perplexed by the lack of details written about how and why they cloned her. He is now excited to finally tell this story.
The View of Cloning, from a Cloner.......2006-09-06
The most famous sheep in the world, and the most famous lab animal, was Dolly, born in 1996. She was the first mammal cloned from an adult differentiated cell, but she was not at all the first clone. Ian Wilmut was a scientist within the Scottish research team that cloned her, and ten years on he has written a useful book, with science author Roger Highfield, _After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning_ (Norton) which not only gives the history of producing Dolly, and Dolly's life story, but also describes the developments in cloning since then. Wilmut has necessarily become an advisor on the ethics of cloning and embryo research, and while there will be many who disagree with his utilitarian views set down in his book, they do represent a thoughtful scientific opinion of where cloning and embryo procedures ought and ought not to be used.
Wilmut makes clear that Dolly was not the first clone, but the first mammalian clone produced from DNA derived from a differentiated adult cell; he gives a history of pre-Dolly cloning. While the ideas behind cloning are simple, carrying out the procedure is extremely difficult, requiring precise manipulation of unimaginably small cell parts. The manipulation machine, for instance, by which a technician looks into a microscope and carefully removes or replaces cell nuclei, sat on a desk that sat on a heavy metal plate that in turn sat on squash balls to absorb any vibrations from a door slamming or even a radio playing. Wilmut favors human embryo research because of its potential outcomes. The earliest embryo (even sometimes called a pre-embryo) is a blastocyst, a microscopic ball of around a hundred cells in a hollow sphere. There is not enough differentiation within the blastocyst into even primitive nerves, and so we may definitely say that the blastocyst has no awareness and no capacity to feel pain. Wilmut for this, and many other reasons given here, feels that there is no possibility of cruelty to a blastocyst, and that they can be subjected to experiment. He does feel that embryos deserve elemental respect; they should be used in research when there is no other means of doing the research, and any embryo thus used should be used with the consent of the adults whose DNA was joined to make it.
Wilmut is firmly against what he sees as the folly of cloning humans, and that the production of "designer babies" even if feasible (they are not even close) ought to be rejected. Again, this is a judgement based on practicality: he asks us to imagine rich parents who hire a staff to engineer an intellectually gifted child, only to wind up eventually with "a sullen adolescent who smokes marijuana and doesn't talk to them." Also he points out that cloning has huge risks and costs in making a clone; for Dolly, for instance, 277 donor udder cells were transformed into only 29 embryos, only one of which prospered in the surrogate mother. And no one really knows how good a clone Dolly was; she had a good life and seemed to enjoy being sociable due to her fame, but she lived less than eight years, not a good outcome for a pampered sheep. Dolly was a remarkable experiment that helped us better understand the biochemical mechanics of reproduction; Wilmut is strongly against any such experimentation on humans. His book gives up-to-date reporting on where scientists are and are heading, including the catastrophic mistakes by the once admired, now disgraced Woo Suk Hwang of Korea. Wilmut's passionate arguments about using the current technologies sensibly and ethically to benefit future generations ought to help in understanding the ethics of the most controversial area in biology.
A pick for both general-interest collections and any who would understand the nature of human cloning issues today.......2006-08-17
Ten years ago author Ian Wilmut shocked science and the general public when he revealed his team of researchers had cloned the first sheep from an adult cell. His revelation was to spark a controversy not just in science, but among consumers and the general public. AFTER DOLLY: THE USES AND MISUSES OF HUMAN CLONING continues the discussion, surveying the current state of the field of cloning, discussing the science behind Dolly's creation and its refinement since, and posing a strong statement on the moral necessity of cloning to cure disease. A pick for both general-interest collections and any who would understand the nature of human cloning issues today.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Superb.......2006-07-06
Ten years ago today, on July 5, 1996, the famous sheep called Dolly was born. There were no press announcements, for her "creators" had yet to submit the paper on the experimental methods and results to a professional scientific journal. It was not until February of the following year that most of press and the world got to hear of this extraordinary accomplishment with mammalian cloning. There is probably no single scientific experiment that has caused such controversy as this one, with most of this controversy coming from a misguided and publicity seeking press.
The authors present in this book an overview of the experiment from standpoint of Ian Wilmut, as one who was directly involved in bringing about the birth of Dolly. Written with the assistance of a professional writer, Wilmut gives the reader a fascinating look into the science behind Dolly, and also make commentary on the biological and genetic science that came after her birth. All of these developments are very exciting, and are ample proof that we are living in extraordinary times. Genetic engineering is a fascinating technology, and hopefully it will continue to play a large role in optimizing the health of all organisms, human and otherwise.
As expected from his public discussion, Wilmut is against reproductive cloning. However, his warnings against its practice he backs up with scientific argument, detailing the many problems that arise in attempts to clone mammals. The authors do touch on the ethical arguments against human cloning, but their arguments on this account are faulty, and have been successfully countered by other individuals, and will not be repeated here.
Wilmut comes across in the book as being a very practical, patient, and humble man, and one who is definitely fed up with the public outcries and misrepresentations of biological science in today's newspapers and magazines. The reader is left with the impression that Wilmut felt honored to be involved in the Dolly experiment, and even might have been slightly surprised at its success, comparing for instance his laboratories with other more equipped laboratories across the ocean.
Cloning from adults at the time was "proved" to be "impossible" by some molecular biologists of the time, as the authors point out. One can only imagine then the excitement when Wilmut and his team verified through ultrasound that the Dolly fetus was healthy. And their determination to proceed with the experiment, in spite of the "impossibility" proofs, is another strong argument for ignoring the opinions of experts when doing scientific research. Frequently the experts are correct, but their words are not sacrosanct, as laboratory experimentation in this case proved all too well. One hates to think of the research that has not been done because of discouragement from "experts."
Since the book is about genetic engineering as it progressed after the birth of Dolly, one expects to find discussion on transgenesis and pharming, and this is indeed the case. The authors give an encapsulated but effective overview of the developments in genetic engineering primarily from the viewpoint on how they will affect human health.
The authors are optimistic about the future of genetic engineering, but are hesitant to engage in utopianism. They want to leave the impression that genetic engineering will have a minimal impact as compared with what has been done via natural evolution. But as the technologies of genetic engineering become more perfected, and as mammalian cloning becomes better understood, it is fair to say that genetic engineering will have a major impact in the twenty-first century. If it enhances human intelligence and health, if it makes couples happy with children born through human cloning, if it creates thousands of new transgenic animals and plants, in short if it radically changes the biosphere as we know it in a way that makes life on Earth more harmonious, then Wilmut and his team, along with all the other genetic engineers, deserve not only our utmost respect and praise, but also our envy: for taking the first steps into a fascinating new frontier.
Book Description
Recent scientific breakthroughs, celebrity patient advocates, and conflicting religious beliefs have come together to bring the state of stem cell research—specifically embryonic stem cell research—into the political crosshairs. President Bush's watershed policy statement allows federal funding for embryonic stem cell research but only on a limited number of stem cell lines. Millions of Americans could be affected by the continuing political debate among policymakers and the public.
Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine provides a deeper exploration of the biological, ethical, and funding questions prompted by the therapeutic potential of undifferentiated human cells. In terms accessible to lay readers, the book summarizes what we know about adult and embryonic stem cells and discusses how to go about the transition from mouse studies to research that has therapeutic implications for people. Perhaps most important, Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine also provides an overview of the moral and ethical problems that arise from the use of embryonic stem cells. This timely book compares the impact of public and private research funding and discusses approaches to appropriate research oversight. Based on the insights of leading scientists, ethicists, and other authorities, the book offers authoritative recommendations regarding the use of existing stem cell lines versus new lines in research, the important role of the federal government in this field of research, and other fundamental issues.
Book Description
This volume brings together a group of essays by leading philosophers of science, ethicists, and legal scholars, commissioned for an important and controversial conference on genetics and crime. The essays address basic conceptual, methodological, and ethical issues raised by genetic research on criminal behavior but largely ignored in the public debate. They explore the complexities in tracing any genetic influence on criminal, violent, or antisocial behavior, the varieties of interpretation to which evidence of such influences is subject, and the relevance of such influences to the moral and legal appraisal of criminal conduct. The volume provides a critical overview of the assumptions, methods, and findings of recent behavioral genetics.
Book Description
The role of quality assessments in social policy, especially health policy, and ethical and social issues raised by prenatal testing for disability are discussed in this analysis. A theme of the literature has been the role played by controversial assumptions about the quality of life of people with disabilities. This book turns the perspectives of disability scholars to issues that have largely been the province of health methodology, policy and philosophy, while re-directing philosophical policy analysis to problems that have largely been the province of disability scholarship.
Customer Reviews:
A Serious Look at a Problem of Our Time.......2005-05-30
With increased pre-natal genetic testing comes the knowledge to know of disabilities that the chile will face later. This book is a series of papers describing the ethical and social issues this raises. A second theme is a discussion of the quality of life for disable persons.
This book came from a working group that the editors convened. Papers were presented on the subject, and then afterwards they were revised in light of the deliberations at the conference. The contents range from the social contract under which we all live to the right of the individual woman to terminate a pregnancy for any reason what so ever (as defined by Roe v. Wade).
Book Description
How should we respond to individuals with disabilities? What does it mean to be disabled? Over fifty million Americans, from neonates to the fragile elderly, are disabled. Some people say they have the right to full social participation, while others repudiate such claims as delusive or dangerous. In this compelling book, three experts in ethics, medicine, and the law address pressing disability questions in bioethics and public policy. Anita Silvers, David Wasserman, and Mary B. Mahowald test important theories of justice by bringing them to bear on subjects of concern in a wide variety of disciplines dealing with disability. They do so in the light of recent advances in feminist, minority, and cultural studies, and of the groundbreaking Americans with Disabilities Act. Visit our website for sample chapters!
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- Chapters cover all aspects of genetic issues
- Re-Thinking our Obsession with Genetics
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Future Perfect
Lori B. Andrews
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
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Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age
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The Double-Edged Helix: Social Implications of Genetics in a Diverse Society
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ASIN: 0231121628 |
Book Description
Genetic technologies have moved off the pages of science fiction and into our everyday lives. Internists now offer genetic testing for cancers and early coronary disease. Obstetricians make genetic predictions during pregnancy about a baby's future health. Even dentists are getting into the act, offering testing for a genetic propensity to peridontal disease. In this pathbreaking book, Lori Andrews provides the first detailed glimpse into how genetic testing can change your self-image, your relationships with loved ones, and your expectations about your children. She documents how ill prepared doctors are to deal with complex genetic issues. Andrews also uncovers the ways in which employers, insurers, schools, and courts have discriminated against people on the basis of their genetic make up. She traces the legal case history of genetics litigation and legislation and describes the ethical and social protections that need to be in place so that the Human Genome Project does not lead us directly toward Brave New World.
In Future Perfect, Lori Andrews offers a new plan for making decisions as individuals and as a society based on emerging issues of ethics and science. Who should have access to your personal genetic information? Should genetic treatments be used to enhance characteristics such as intelligence in "normal" individuals? Should gene therapy be undertaken on embryos, changing their genetic inheritance, as well as that of future generations? If a woman learns she has a genetic mutation predisposing her to breast cancer, does she have a moral or even a legal duty to share that information with an estranged relative? Andrews considers the answer to these and many other questions that have profound implications for health care providers, medical organizations, social institutions, legislatures, courts, and ordinary people.
Customer Reviews:
Chapters cover all aspects of genetic issues.......2001-08-11
Many books on genetics only address issues of interest to scientists or ethical studies programs: Future Perfect outlines some issues and solutions for individuals making decisions based on genetic testing and facts, providing the first insights into how such results can change self-images, relationships, and families. Chapters cover all aspects of genetic issues; from business and employer concerns to family make-up and inherited traits.
Re-Thinking our Obsession with Genetics.......2001-07-31
I bought this book after hearing Lori speak at a forum at the University of Washington. While this is a book primarily about public policy (what our government should do about making laws covering genetic testing), it covers all aspects of genetics, from a history of genetic testing to the ways in which genetic testing information have been used and abused in our society. I came away worried about our future but hopeful that we could use the new information that genetic testing provides, without considering it the end of the line. Genetics are one piece of information that need to be considered along with ethics, other medical information, and personal beliefs.
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Crafting a Cloning Policy: From Dolly to Stem Cells
Andrea, L Bonnicksen
Manufacturer: Georgetown University Press
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Public Policy: Politics, Analysis, And Alternatives
ASIN: 087840371X |
Book Description
This book looks at the what kinds of policies were developed to address advances in cloning technology in the U.S. after Dolly. The broader question Bonnicksen addresses is the extent to which we are willing to regulate new genetic technologies and how such regulation happens. This book is at the nexus of policy and bioethics. Bioethicists and ethical issues play a large role in her story (esp. the National BIoethics Advisory Committee), as do the interest groups and players usually examined in the political science literature--government agencies, state and federal courts, legislatures, private groups (e.g., medical/professional associations). She concludes that the U.S. has a large trust in scientific developments, difficulty in reaching ethical concensus, and a pluralistic, free-market, individualist mindset that all shape a cautious approach to regulating medical technologies. There is one comparative chapter that also looks at the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Book Description
Over a decade ago, the field of bioethics was established in response to the increased control over the design of living organisms afforded by both medical genetics and biotechnology. Since its introduction, bioethics has become established as an academic
Customer Reviews:
All manner of public policy issues are surveyed.......2005-07-05
For a reader in bioethics, don't miss Genetics: Science, Ethics And Public Policy: it gathers writings from the leading bioethicists of our times: essays which comment on major issues present and emerging in the science fields. From setting genetics policies and agendas to genetic counseling for the disabled, all manner of public policy issues are surveyed.
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An intriguing discussion emerges in essays filled with scholarship and backed by research.......2005-08-08
The basic premise of Rights And Liberties In The Biotech Age is that we need a 'Genetic Bill of Rights' to assure genetic developments are kept under close control - and that the public be protected from these developments. To this end, professor Krimsky's background in environmental policy and urban planning blends with freelance writer/Responsible Genetics program director Peter Shorett to bring together contributors from a range of fields who discuss such rights and liberties, from rights to genetic-free foods to life patents and scientific exchanges. An intriguing discussion emerges in essays filled with scholarship and backed by research.
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